Krakow, Poland - New Year's

For New Year's we've made it a tradition to go some place new that has a great event planned. Having been to Scotland's Hogmany last year, we had high hopes. We thought about places like Madrid, Lisbon, and Finland, but settled on Krakow, Poland. Krakow is the second city in Poland and is know for its large student population, the biggest market square in Europe, and Auschwitz.

Just one corner of the square. The yellow building on the right is actually only in the center of the square. The square is about 50 meters

Ok, this was our apartment. No shit. And this is only the living room, there were two other huge rooms just as big. Oh yeah, we had the one upstairs too.... 210 square meters. We got very lucky finding this. We were looking at all sorts of apartments all over Krakow. The were all expensive and required 5 nights stay, we only wanted 3. But somehow I found this one. The prices were the same, but we were able to get the three nights. And to make it even better, we were in the best possible location. RIGHT on the square, and I mean perfect!

The BOOYAH Gang at the castle

The grand room in the salt mines

Being in Krakow we figured we'd hit up a few of the major tourist sites. Krakow is know for Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. But, since it was a festive time, we didn't want to get all depressed. I've been to Dachau after Oktoberfest, it really really kills the festive vibe.... So we went to the salt mines. There is a huge salt deposit there and they've been mining there for like 500 years. So there are tunnels everywhere, but what makes it cool is how they carved all sorts of things in the caves. There are a bunch of statues but also huge rooms, cathedrals, lakes, etc...

Pete and I sporting the BOOYAH shirts

Before the trip we decided, like all cool large groups of guys going to a festival, to make t-shirts. Mainly, so we could have something to remember our group by in the years to come as most of us will be leaving Europe soon. After much (way too much) deliberation, we decided on Orange shirts with the BOOYAH World logo. Signifying our group as World traveling dominators. If you want to know where BOOYAH came from, its a long story and not for the faint of heart.

Prepping for New Year's.

The drink of Poland is an herb vodka called
ZUBROWKA, which means BISON. They mix it with apple juice, which makes it very dangerous as you can't taste a thing. We met up with a polish friend of ours from Trier and his friends and decided to throw a party in our Apartment on New Year's in stead of getting smashed around in the crowd. So we bought a ton, a TON of ZUBROWKA and started inviting people up from the street. We would send runners out. Then from the window we would point out who we thought should come up to the party. It worked sometimes...

View from our window on New Year's night. This is early on, the crowd got much larger and was packed all the way to our building. The stage of the concert is just to the left of the tower, it was only about 300 yards away.

Edingburgh, Jan 2006

Just looking at some old pics that I thought were cool and wanted to share them

Tignes, France

Since I didn't go home for Christmas, a few friends and I decided to go skiing. For the longest time we were planning on going back to our favorite place, St. Anton in Austria. But we were having a hell of a time getting a room. So we canceled that. Good thing we did, cause they never got any snow there, and I'm not sure that they have any now either. Its been pretty warm in Europe too. El Nino.... Anyways, Eamon found us a room in Tignes. This is one of the ski resorts used in the Albertville Olympics in '92. Its also right next to Val d'sere. It was a long drive so we went for a full 4 days.

There was really only one bar to go to, so we ended up at the same place every night. Then at around midnight all the people from this bar would walk over to a different bar. Kinda of strange. Definitely not the party atmosphere in Austria. Oh, all the people were British. I mean everyone. I don't think I heard French all weekend.

The snowboarding was pretty good considering there hadn't been much snowfall. There were a ton of rocks and I really messed up my board. The main reason we went to Tignes was because of the glacier. It would allow us to ski even if there wasn't snow anywhere else. But turns out, the glacier was closed most of the time due to high winds, we only got up there for one run down.

Unfortunately, for most of the trip Eamon and T-Met were deathly ill. Tony only boarded one day and Eamon two. Eamon didn't even go out at night so that shows just how sick he was. I started to feel sick too, but it didn't stop me. I guess this is what happens when you have 4 grown men living in a room about 20m2.